I went to my sacred lake in the journey space to ask spirit whether I should continue along my current path.
Before I’d even taken in the familiar shore, the stones beneath me, the still water held against the mountain, she appeared.
A great white jungle cat, sleek as poured milk, silent as snow.
She turned and led me to the fire.
There, she took me down into the oldest places in me, the tar pits where I’ve drowned and died before, the dark interior chamber I sealed away so long ago I no longer remember its entrance.
I’ve called it protection. I’ve called it many things.
She called it something to be known.
Not healed. Not opened. Simply known.
Then another cat came to stand behind me.
This one black, enormous, and wild.
I could feel her teeth without seeing them, the weight of her waiting just beyond my shoulder.
I knew this one to be Fear.
Strangely, I felt no terror.
Only a vast, gray indifference. The peculiar exhaustion of having lived so long beside the thing you’re afraid of that even fear itself has begun to feel familiar.
I want to know what is on the other side of all this guardedness.
I want to know what it would be like to stop keeping that soft chunk of my heart behind its ancient walls.
And yet, I don’t want my life to change.
There is no contradiction here. There are simply two cats.
The white one before me.
The black one behind me.
And me, caught between them, with no revelation arriving to make the choice for me.
So for now I sit between the fire and the dark.
The white cat watching.
The black cat waiting.
I don’t know what I will do.
I am only beginning to learn how to stay.